


Tea Break

by stardustedgirl



Series: the tea verse [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Bruce and Darcy are bffs, Bruce is wise, Darcy is pining, F/M, Jane is oblivious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 05:27:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7030885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardustedgirl/pseuds/stardustedgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the wedding, she convinces her mother that Bruce is not her boyfriend, he’s her scientist best friend. She also informs her mother that Bruce is gay and the look he sends her over her mother’s shoulder has her in tears for five minutes afterwards.</p><p>He gets her back by telling her mother that she's seeing someone named Skull, who's in a motorcycle gang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tea Break

**Author's Note:**

> Because I needed Bruce/Darcy friendship and the internet wasn't giving it to me. Trigger warning is for mentions of panic attacks/descriptions of panic attacks (based on personal experience).

Darcy isn’t exactly sure how she and Bruce became friends. She remembers the day she started going to his lab, but she can’t remember when or what or how they started talking. Jane was plunging into the world of science with her team - had been for the last two weeks - and Darcy couldn’t keep up. The new interns who worked with Jane actually understood everything that the scientist said, and worse, they looked at Darcy with expressions that stated in bold ‘why are you here, again?’. It was all terribly isolating and Darcy hated it. She’d made some vague comment about exploring and Jane had waved a hand in acknowledgement and then called one of the interns over.

She’d escaped Jane’s lab and started wandering around that floor, bypassing Tony’s lab and then she found the one lab she hadn’t ventured into. Jane never went to Bruce, Bruce came to Jane. It was rare that he ever came to science! with Jane, unlike Tony who was always underfoot. But what Darcy can gather is that Bruce is a quiet, polite guy and that he likes to be alone. And that’s fine, because sometimes the feeling of isolation, even when she’s surrounded by people, gets so bad that Darcy has to isolate herself on purpose, just to feel like she’s in control. It’s weird.

But she’s never actually been to Bruce’s lab and isn’t sure if she can be there or not, so she hovers awkwardly in the doorway until he glances up, takes in her distressed look, and says, “tea?”

Darcy’s never been a tea person - she’s a coffee girl through and through - but his voice is mellow and welcoming and something about doing something out of the norm is actually really, really soothing, so she says yes. He makes them both cups of green tea and then gets back to whatever he was doing. She drinks her tea tentatively, but there was no need to worry. If something could taste like a sensation, this tastes like comfort. She doesn’t understand why it makes her feel more like herself, more like a person and less like a stray dog that follows Jane around all the time, but it does, so she drinks it.

For some reason, she keeps coming back. Sometimes they don’t drink tea, but that’s only when Bruce’s hair is even crazier than usual and his face is unshaven and she decides that those are the days that science! is being difficult. She doesn’t come every day, not at first, but her quick visits get closer together and then longer and longer. Pretty soon she starts talking, without really making sure he’s listening, but it feels good to talk about the things that actually matter.

Despite what people think, she’s not some ditzy, internet obsessed, unintelligent college dropout. Well, that’s not entirely true. She is a little internet obsessed and she did drop out of college, but that was only for a year because Jane was losing her mind and falling apart and she needed Darcy to hold her together. But after that year, Darcy picked back up and earned the rest of her degree through online schooling. Darcy is not ditzy and she is not unintelligent.

So she talks. She tells him about everything and anything because no matter what she says, she doesn’t think he’ll go blabbing about how sometimes she has panic attacks or how there’s a little hole in her chest that turns into a gaping ache that sucks everything up inside her sometimes. She talks about how everyone treats her like she’s an idiot who doesn’t understand anything and how infuriating it is when he calls her out on it.

“Why don’t you let them know that you’re not what they think you are?”

She shrugs and sips her tea.

“I don’t know.”

He turns and regards her for a moment before nodding. “It sounds like they treat you like the Darcy you were when you first came to Jane.”

And that - that makes a lot of sense. It also pulls her to a halt and makes her think about everything that’s happened and conclude, that yes, she is a completely different person now than she was back then. She likes to think she’s a lot more mellow and little wiser than she used to be. Maybe it’s because of what went on in the desert and London or maybe it’s because she knows things now about herself that she hadn’t. She doesn’t know. But she feels like a different person.

It’s kind of amazing, really, that Bruce can see it too, at least when she takes in the fact that nobody else can.

After that conversation, Darcy makes it her mission to be Bruce’s best friend. She comes as much as she can for as long as she can for tea or just conversation and when she gets a desperate ‘oh my god, Darcy where are you??? Are you okay??? Are you dead????’ Text from Jane (which she receives at some point every day), she and Bruce share a look and she thanks him for tea and says she’ll see him later.

At some point in all this, he convinces her that yes, she did in fact, have the right to ask Pepper for a floor. She had been toying with the idea for months now, because as wonderful as it was that Thor was back and that Jane was over the moon, the noises that came from their bedroom were disturbing and often had her in the safety of Bruce’s lab at late hours of the night. Also, he reminded her gently, she was officially part of SI as Director of Applied Sciences. He didn’t mention the fact that Maria Hill had taken interest in her, and she was glad for it.

So she finally worked up the nerve to talk to the woman (seriously, Pepper Potts was the most intimidating person Darcy had ever laid eyes on) about it and all goes well. Pepper agrees that Darcy has definitely put in enough work to get a floor and that she’ll draw up plans for her. And Pepper does draw up plans. It’s fairly similar to every other floor, but because Darcy is a technology junkie, there’s little things just for her. She doesn’t know the extent of these little things, but she really does appreciate it.

When she moves into her floor, it’s not a big affair. Thor lifts the heavy things, they use an elevator to go up one floor, and everything takes less than four hours. It’s easy and nice and surprisingly, the lack of Jane’s work all over everything and even just being away from Thor and Jane is such a relief. Darcy has a dance party with her music blasting and laughs because no one can hear her - the entire floor is soundproof. It’s great.

A few weeks into living, technically, by herself, she invites Bruce over. They’ve been talking about their personal recipes for a few weeks now, and she’s craving chili and tea, so she calls Bruce. He shows up twenty minutes later with chili ingredients and teaches her how to make it. It’s spicy and comforting and he made sure to bring the tea he made for her the first time she was in his lab, and it’s good. They watch movies and she laughs and points at the cheesiness or corniness and he points out the illogical parts. She thinks they can be best friends.

At some point they both read, and then watch, The Fault in Our Stars. It’s a teary-eyed night. She comes up with the idea that ‘tea break’ will be their ‘okay.’ He gets a little awkward when she first brings it up.

“Darce - you’re great and all but I’m not - I don’t -”

Darcy’s laugh had caught him off guard and the offended look he sent her was, in fact, deserved. “Christ, no. Sorry Bruce, but you are so not my type. If you’d let me finish, tea break can be our always even though we aren’t in love with each other and as far as I know, neither of us are dying of cancer. It’s our best friend ‘okay.’”

He’d accepted that and sometimes when things are claustrophobic or she has a panic attack or she just wants company, she sends him a text that says, tea break? He usually responds with tea break. But sometimes things are too crazy in his lab so he sends the emoji with it’s mouth covered in response.

And eventually he takes her with him to go tea shopping and pretty soon it turns into a once-a-month thing and she has an entire cabinet filled with partially empty boxes of tea. And yes, she does drink them all, and yes, she does need them all. She doesn’t give up on her love of coffee, but he makes sure she buys enough teas with caffeine in them that she doesn’t die when she doesn’t have time to go down to the communal kitchen and make a cup and has to rely only on tea.

They get to the point that he knows her phone passcode and she’s got selfies with him in the background.

The team eventually notices. No one comes right out and says anything, probably Pepper’s doing, but when they aren’t on a mission, some of the team aren’t exactly stealthy. Tony waggles his eyebrows at her whenever she sits next to Bruce in the communal living or dining room. Clint stares at them a little squinty eyed, like he’s trying to figure them out. Steve smiles at her more than he used to and his eyes crinkle at the corners when Bruce is in the room. Natasha sends side-eyed glances that she knows Darcy can see and then will return to whatever she’s doing, but with a quirk to her lips. Bucky doesn’t really do anything, but once she sees him look at the pair of them and then jerk his head towards Steve with an arched eyebrow. She kind of wishes that he was a little jealous, but when she tells Bruce, he just gives her a sly grin and continues on with his business.

Jane and Thor are oblivious. It stings a little - she thought she and Jane were close and that Jane would be the first to ask - but she doesn’t blame Thor. He’s always been a little oblivious to certain things. But she is a little resentful towards Jane - freaking Jane, who she followed all over the damn place. She and Jane hadn’t been friends when she first interned but they were - had been? - best friends before Thor showed up.

She’s dragged Bruce out to dress shop for her cousin’s wedding in Florida when she brings it up. “It’s just - we weren’t friends when I first started interning for her. She and Eric had this friendship thing going on, I guess it’s part of science, so we were strictly professional. But I dropped out of college for her and I’ve followed her all over the place, and I mean I know that we’re friends, but it feels like she’s ignoring me at this point and honestly, I’m kind of hurt.” As she finished speaking, she stepped out of the dressing room in a navy blue dress.

Bruce glanced up from his phone and shook his head. “Not that one - it’s practically crying out ‘I’m just here to get drunk and hook up with someone’,” he said and then returned to his phone as she assessed the dress and then, agreeing with his opinion, ducked back into the dressing room.

“I don’t think she’s purposefully ignoring you, Darcy. I think that between Thor and her work, she’s a little caught up right now.” Bruce was always so rational - it was both a blessing and a curse when it came to decision making. “I get that she hasn’t seen the guy in like, a year, but come on! You can only have so much reunion sex before it gets a little out of control.” There was a choking noise and Darcy was still wearing her victorious grin when she stepped out in a peach-colored dress. The face of disgust he made at the dress was hilarious. “Try the green one,” he suggested as he returned to his phone, a small grimace of distaste still lingering.

She returned to the dressing room to shuck the horrendous monstrosity that was the peach dress, but continued to talk. “Do you think she likes one of her science-y interns better? I mean, technically I’m not her intern, but you know what I mean,” Darcy said as she wiggled a little to get into the dress. She cast an approving look at herself while he responded.

“It’s a possibility - do you like me more than Jane?” That stopped her short. She stepped out of the dressing room and considered him for a minute. “I - don’t know. I love Jane, but sometimes I think she only became my friend because I was there.” Bruce nodded his head once and then shrugged. “Sometimes only time will tell with these things. Also, that’s the dress you need to get.”

She cast another look to the mirror at the dress and then nodded her head in agreement. “Well I’ve never been one to hurry up and wait,” she muttered as she got dressed in her usual clothes. As she stepped out of the dressing room, Bruce gave her a look that clearly said, ‘well you’ll just have to learn how to,’. She wasn’t sure when they began to speak between facial expressions, but she’s glad they have. It’s saved them plenty of what would have been wasted breath.

She rolled her eyes at him and then looked over the dress as they approach the register. “Do I need shoes for this or do I have a pair?” She asked, glancing over. He paused and then shook his head with a frown. “You still have those black pumps, don’t you?” He asked as she paid for the garment and took her bag. “I think so,” she replied as she linked arms with him.

Needless to say, that’s the end of that conversation. It's a good place to end up.

_(At the wedding, she convinces her mother that Bruce is not her boyfriend, he’s her scientist best friend. She also informs her mother that Bruce is gay and the look he sends her over her mother’s shoulder has her in tears for five minutes afterwards.)_

_(He gets her back by telling her mother that she's seeing someone named Skull, who's in a motorcycle gang.)_

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to CodenameCarrot for suggesting the edit I've made to the end!


End file.
